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We’re happy today to announce the release of Nightingale 1.8.1 for both Linux and Windows! Download it from the front page and enjoy the first Nightingale ever!

Nightingale is a media player, which doesn’t just organize and play your media library – it also integrates the web into your media experience. It is customizable to fit to your personal needs and style – you can, for example, get an add-on for Last.fm integration. Everyone can participate and create his own add-ons and feathers (the Nightingale term for skins), as Nightingale is based on the Mozilla XULRunner, also used in Firefox.

Nightingale is a fork of the media player Songbird, which dropped official Linux support and ended most of their involvement with the community. As a result, Nightingale is here to first provide a solid, Mozilla based media player for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X users, all under Open Source licenses – the GPL, LGPL, MPL, and BSD licenses, to be exact.

We released 1.8.1 to show you the progress we’re making in creating a new bird for playing the web, and to invite you to get involved in Nightingale’s development. We rely on your ideas, bug reports and other feedback, so please test the release and let us know what you think! Head to the forums or join us on IRC, irc.mozilla.org in #nightingale to get in touch with us. We welcome all users, developers, translators, designers, documentation writers, and anyone who is willing to help the project’s success! We’d love to have you as an active part of the Nightingale Community!

In an effort to emphasize the point, we must say again that 1.8.1 is a preview release. We’re working on a XULRunner/Gecko 6 based Nightingale, slated for release within the next year (which will based on the current Songbird trunk, unlike this release). Expect better speed, stability, and security, as well as plenty of new features and improvements for the 1.11 release – it will be the first ‘bird based player to use a modern version of Gecko, and for Linux users, the first to use only system libraries.

With Nightingale 1.8.1 we also had a relaunch of the Nightingale Website, with this new blog, upgraded forums and a wiki. Services for translation, bug tracking and add-ons are planned. For now, some add-ons are hosted on a wiki page – ports of GeekShadow’s and my own Songbird add-ons will be uploaded there soon too. If you create or port any add-ons, you can upload them there, too! If you develop(ed) add-ons or feathers for Songbird, we’d love to have you jump aboard our train, and bring your creations to Nightingale as well!

Erm… Nightingale does everything the old fashioned way…it’s not like Amarok, and it’s not cloud based in terms of the music experience.

While it’s built on Mozilla, and has OPTIONAL ways of integrating the web into your multimedia experience, it’s essentially a simple player that supports playlists, sorting by genre/album/artist/albumartist/etc …

Basically it’s like this: Nightingale is built on the Mozilla platform, i.e. the interface is mainly written in XUL, CSS and JavaScript.
This makes Nightingale very flexible in terms of add-ons and themes but it also means that we automatically have Gecko included. We could now ignore it and remove the browser, but why should we? Gecko would still be part of Nightingale, so why not use it?

We aren’t 100% sure – the Mac build system is out of date and pretty broken, and I’m not much of a Mac guy…we’re working on it for 1.8.1, but if we don’t get it working there we most definitely will have it working for 1.11!

If I were you, I’d go ask about it in our IRC or on the forums – we have some other devs there who may have a better answer.

Hi guys, I can’t find release 1.8 anywhere on the website. All I see is Nightingale 1.10 which is isn’t working very well for my Ubuntu 11.10 machine. It is basically unable to add any media. I’m hoping the bug is fixed in 1.8…

Can email me link at mo|DOT|mashi|AT|gmail|DOT|com (sorry about the akward email – precaution again spam bots).

… you can get Nightingale 1.11 from the home page, which is the current release. There was no 1.10 release.
You SHOULD NOT use 1.8, as you will loose all your library when updating from 1.8 to any other version. 1.8 was a preview release.

For the sake of completeness (but again: if you ever want to update, don’t use it), old releases are available in their folders at Sourceforge.

Thank you very much clarifying the versions and the update issues. Unfortunately I would have no media library to loose as Nightingale is not adding any of my media files.

I’ve figured out that it’s not adding mp3 (which all my files are). So I went and converted one of them to ogg. At that point Songbird added but wouldn’t play it. To make the ogg wasn’t corrupted, I played it in VLC and it played perfectly.

Any thoughts, guys? I lovd Songbird and I really can’t wait to get beautiful Nightingale going on my Ubuntu 11.10.